A Windy Winter Solstice
Bodmin Moor hosts a complete kaleidoscope of weather, so dry but very windy was just another facet of midwinter meteorology for the journeyman dowser to expereince.
This year’s activities were concentrated in the centre circle of the three at the Hurlers, which made it a little easier for the energies of the participants to be associated with the synchronous changing energies of the site.
Celebrants processing around the centre circle
Image courtesy of Pete Bousefield
I was joined by fellow TD members, Pete Bousefield and Ali Denham - with Pete and Ali looking at earth energy lines and auras, and me measuring leys and braiding.
What I am calling braiding in this context is the intersecting pair (and sometimes double pair) of energy lines that are often tightly linked with the outer ring of stones demarcating a site. I had assumed up until this outing that the energy braid was a static feature, held in place by the stones themselves. However, this experiment implied that the braiding ‘rotates’ to some extent around the ring, possibly activated by the changing energy within.
While I may well have been getting a bit distracted by the wildly flashing and chasing LED Christmas lights that adorn so many dwellings at this time of year, it did seem that the initial flagging up of the braid had moved rotationally (but not laterally) during the lapse of half an hours’s singing and processing. I would have to re-assesshis finding on another occasion, when there was no other activity happening, but it would be intriguing to think that the interwoven forces were indeed in motion - and possibly activated by detectable esoteric energy, either human, nature-based or cosmic.
The three leys that I had flagged up all widened somewhat, but not exuberantly. The really odd finding was that the one entering from the north-west was wildly skewed to the west. The eastward expansion was just a few centimetres (in line with the other two leys) but the westward expansion was in the order of a metre or more It is not unusual to get this type of asymmetrical expansion, but the mismatch between the two directions was quite exceptional.
Ali comments: I dowsed the Arthur and Guinevere energy lines noding twice within the southern circle, as well as at the node stone at the northern end. This was new for me. One of the nodes seemed Yin, and the other Yang. They were only a few metres apart.
I’ve come across Yin and Yang nodes, close to each other once before. They seemed to be concentrated/drawn in, to only 9 paces wide, maximum, after the singing and sunrise. Similarly, Michael flowing from the southern to the centre circle seemed to have gathered himself in a concentrated manner, with each of his seven bands being only about a foot wide.
Pete found that the overall widening of the aura of the circle was also disproportionately westward, but again, we have no identifiable mechanism or workable hypotheses as to why this should have been so. With the wind being strongly southwesterly, even a simple physical rationale seems unlikely. All of the other energy lines expanded to a greater or lesser extent - and were already starting to compress again shortly after the end of the singing.
My subsequent dowsing at home indicates that the exaggeration of the westerly expansion is ‘cosmic’ yet seems to have little to do with the planets. I think we are into the territory where more subtle non-physical influences come in to play.
Measurement of the overall influence on the various energy lines, taken as a group, indicates that something in the order of 49% was due directly to the ritual activities of the participants and around 28% to the opening of the information channel by the dowsers. Only a rather disappointing 16% seemed to be anything to do with the celestial Solstice itself, as such - but that won’t stop any of us from dowsing there again on another waymarking day.
Many thanks, as ever, to friend of the TDs Anne Hughes for organising the event (and the subsequent welcome warming breakfast at The Caradon Inn afterwards) - and to all those who sang, processed and ,of course, dowsed.
Nigel Twinn Tamar Dowsers, December 2023